It’s the ultimate house call: 8,000 miles from home. In an empty classroom in South Sudan, Africa, six doctors shake hands, comfort babies and give their patients something they don’t often experience: Western medicine, a diagnosis, and a bit of hope.

The clinic is noisy, full of chatter. It smells like sweat. Doctors, interpreters, crying babies: It’s all a dizzy mix of confusion. Yellow paint is peeling off the concrete walls. The chalkboard is scrawled with lessons. I laugh when I see the English lesson on the ancient chalkboard. It says, “Local news.”

The Africans lined up early this morning, getting a number. They’re lined up now for four blocks. They walked to this remote village wearing their cleanest, finest Sunday clothes. The women wear colorful fabrics and wraps. There are bare foot babies with dirty faces. I saw a newborn with bumpy dots of infection on her face and neck. Dr. Dan Steier treats the people kindly, gently, with compassion. He doesn’t wear gloves. None of them do.

I see hernias, broken bones, leprosy. I see a 10-year-old girl with an infection in her left hand. It’s four times the normal size.

Across the room, Dan’s brother, Dr. Jim Steier, takes time to listen. He shakes his head. He smiles. He’s like your favorite grandpa. He has a calmness that comforts, no matter what language you speak.

They examine the patients, letting them know they’re not afraid of catching something. The doctors reminding each other that human touch is a significant part of practicing the “art” of medicine.

“They want us to touch them, even though we get cooties,” Dr. Bodo Treu laughed.

I ask him earlier if it ever gets any easier. He walked away with tears in his big blue eyes. He’s the same sassy guy who hours earlier climbed a giant ant hill, taller than me, chiding me to join him. The photos are priceless: King of the ant hill. He’s like a teasing big brother.

They make do with what they have. In the next room, there are overflowing duffle bags full of medicine from Omaha. Those are the meds so graciously donated by folks in the heartland. It’s medicine that’s disappearing quickly.

That bottle of Tylenol donated by your family, it’ll help a 60-year-old grandmother get up off the floor of her mud hut in the morning. Those antibiotics we all take for granted when our kid gets an ear infection, they’ll stop a baby from dying. The vitamins you donated will help prevent malnutrition. The parasite meds they’ll swallow will kill the worms growing in their bellies. The worms give them fat-looking bellies. Bugs stealing nutrition from the children. I learn you can tell when they’re starving because their hair has a reddish tinge.

South Sudan, Africa, boasts the highest infant immortality rate in the world. Here, one-in-four babies die before their fifth birthday. I met a mom yesterday who had 7 children. All but one has died. You see the strain on the faces of the women. The strong, fragile, shy, family-centered women. They come to clinic with the same problems. “My back hurts,” they tell the interpreter in Bari. “My neck is killing me,” they say. The pain travels down the body to the knees and bare, cracked, feet.I laugh when I hear Dr. Jason Fife share some wisdom. The Utah family medicine doctor tells the interpreter to speak to the 35-year-old woman in his chair, “Tell your husband to start carrying everything. Tell him that,” Fife says, watching for her reaction. She turns away in disbelief, wearing a “no-way-in-hell” smile.

It’s a cultural thing, Dr. Jim Steier tells me. He literally called women, “Beasts of burden,” in this country.

“We can’t change that with one office visit,” he said.

That woman and every one of them in line is well aware she’ll live in pain until her daughters are old enough to carry the water, carry the food, carry the family on their backs and heads. Something’s gotta give guys. But in a country that’s officially almost two years old, the women’s movement here is also in the toddler stage.Women here only know what they’ve learned from mom and grandmother.

Try to guess a Sudanese woman’s age after 35, and you’ll be 20 years off. Forty-year-old women look 60. The sun, the lack of food, the lack of medical care, the digging in the dirt. It’s a hard, hard life.

A life made a little more comfortable today, with a simple doctor’s visit.

The volunteer docs will do it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day. And the next.

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